View article

In many professions the demand for work requires employees to work in different shifts to cover varying requirements including areas like health care, protection services, transportation, manufacturing or call centers. However, there are many constraints that need to be satisfied in order to create feasible schedules. The demands can be specified in various ways, different legal requirements need to be respected and employee satisfaction has to be taken into account. Therefore, automated solutions are mandatory to stay competitive. However, even then it is often hard to provide good solutions in reasonable time as many of the problems are NP-hard.

While not each problem will require the whole set of available restrictions, it is cumbersome to develop a new specification format and corresponding solver for each problem. Often these can not be well applied to similar problems differing in some requirements. On the …